Nvidia

In 1993, NVIDIA was incorporated by Jen-Hsun Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. In 1995, the company’s first card, the NV1 was sold as the Diamond Edge. It was a complete 2D/3D PCI card. Microsoft’s DirectX specs caused the card’s sales to plummet, as most began building cards based on this new technology. In 1997, the Riva 128 was their first DirectX compliant card. This launched NVIDIA’s rise to the top with it’s performance and design advantages. In January of 99, the company went public and later acquired it’s one-time competitor 3dfx Interactive. By February 2002, NVIDIA had shipped 100 million processors. For years it shared the top of the video card market with rival ATI. It was later bought by AMD.